Category Archives: US Politics

George Floyd: protesters and police clash in cities across US – live

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The Guardian’s Ankita Rao, reporting from New York, on the mayor’s controversial late-night statements:

Mayor Bill de Blasio took to the podium on Saturday night to tell protestors across the city that they were “heard, loud and clear”.

I’m in Brooklyn to talk about tonight’s protests. https://t.co/oBVXGh7JWo

US prosecutors have filed federal charges against three people in New York, accusing them of using “molotov cocktails” on New York police vehicles during the Friday protests:

BREAKING: Three people charged with federal crimes in connection with Molotov cocktail attacks on the NYPD during #GeorgeFloyd protests in NYC Friday night. pic.twitter.com/dyaDJByMit

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Trump wants America looking at the stars as he drags it through the gutter

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The president is due to attend the rescheduled launch of a manned SpaceX rocket – a welcome diversion from the coronavirus crisis

Making America great again just wasn’t enough. “President Trump is making space great again,” the Republican National Committee declared this week.

Donald Trump returns to Cape Canaveral in Florida on Saturday to witness the rescheduled launch of a SpaceX rocket carrying Nasa astronauts that was delayed by weather three days earlier.

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‘A national crisis’: how the killing of George Floyd is changing US politics

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As people protest across the US, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have offered divergent responses that point to a divisive political debate on race relations

Riots in Minneapolis and across the US triggered by video footage showing George Floyd, a black man, killed under the knee of a police officer, has caused a dramatic shift in the national political debate in America and thrust race to the center of the stage.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden offered divergent responses that point to an even more divisive political debate on race relations and between Democrats and Republicans playing out in the months ahead.

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The Minnesota paradox: how race divides prosperous Minneapolis

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Protests over killing of George Floyd highlight reality of tensions in the Twin Cities

It has been called the “Minnesota paradox”. The Twin Cities, comprising the conjoined urban areas of Minneapolis and St Paul, regularly tops the list of places in the US with the best quality of living.

Largely low rise and sprawling, set around the cities’ lakes and the Mississippi, the area is marked by affordable and largely good quality housing with lawns, parks, museums and tree-lined streets.

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‘Gross incompetence at highest levels’: ex-Obama adviser blasts Trump’s Covid response

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Samantha Power also tells online Hay festival that former US administration underestimated how ‘ripped off’ Americans felt, and discounts possibility of Michelle Obama as vice-president

The US has shown “gross incompetence … at the highest levels” in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Samantha Power, who served as US ambassador to the United Nations under Barack Obama.

Speaking to Philippe Sands for the online version of the Hay festival, Power said that Donald Trump’s administration had failed to learn from the countries hit by the coronavirus before the US.

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Trump signs executive order to narrow protections for social media platforms

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Move comes amid president’s feud with Twitter after it fact-checked him for the first time

Donald Trump has fired a shot across the bows of “big tech” companies by signing an executive order that aims to narrow their protections from liability over the content posted on their services.

The move came as the US president stepped up his attacks against social media giants after Twitter fact-checked him for the first time over a false assertion that mail-in voting leads to widespread voter fraud.

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George Floyd killing: Trump calls protesters ‘thugs’ as fires erupt in Minneapolis on third night of unrest – live

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Completely surreal. Watching the Third Precinct burn surround by thousands of people in complete anarchy. pic.twitter.com/qNVNAJIlA7

Reports that Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey will hold a press conference shortly.

Mayor Frey will hold a news briefing, set to start in a few minutes, about tonight's protests/burning of the 3rd Precinct. @ChaoStrib will have the livestream.

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Trump expected to sign executive order in bid to target Twitter and Facebook

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  • Move could erode legal protections for social media platforms
  • Twitter placed warning on Trump tweets that spread falsehoods

Donald Trump is preparing to sign an executive order that could erode legal protections for social media companies for content posted on their platforms, potentially opening them to liability claims over controversial content.

Related: Trump focuses on possible social media regulation as US coronavirus death toll passes milestone – live

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Biden sets solemn tone as Trump waits 15 hours to mark Covid-19 milestone

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As the toll of Americans killed by the coronavirus passed 100,000, the president was lashing out at Twitter for factchecking his posts

Four hours after Johns Hopkins University recorded that 100,000 American lives were lost to the coronavirus, Joe Biden released a solemn speech.

“My fellow Americans, there are moments in our history so grim, so heart-rending, that they are forever fixed in each of our hearts as shared grief. Today is one of those moments,” said Biden, speaking directly to the camera from an office adorned with American flags.

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Trump campaign attempts to remove satirical cartoon from online retailer

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Cartoonist Nick Anderson calls president ‘adolescent’ after work parodying bleach-injection claim sparked a legal manoeuvre

The Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Nick Anderson has described Donald Trump as an “adolescent wannabe authoritarian”, after the US president’s re-election campaign failed to pull one of Anderson’s cartoons mocking Trump’s inaccurate suggestion that injecting disinfectant could protect against Covid-19.

Anderson put his cartoon The Trump Cult up for sale on the online retailer Redbubble this month. The illustration shows Trump with supporters in Maga hats, serving them a drink that has been labeled “Kool-Aid”, then “Chloroquine” and finally “Clorox”, a US bleach brand. The cartoon is a reference to the 1978 Jonestown massacre, where more than 900 people died after drinking cyanide-laced punch at the order of cult leader Jim Jones, and to Trump’s widely denounced idea of injecting bleach to protect against coronavirus. Trump has also been taking the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a protection against Covid-19, despite a study showing it has been linked to increased deaths in patients.

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As 100,000 die, the virus lays bare America’s brutal fault lines – race, gender, poverty and broken politics

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The US’s brutal fault lines – of race, partisanship, gender, poverty and misinformation – rendered it ill-prepared to meet the challenges of Covid-19

In one of the rare expressions of empathy that Donald Trump has displayed during the course of the coronavirus pandemic, he talked earlier this month about the disease claiming so many lives it was “filling up Yankee Stadium with death”.

Now the death toll from Covid-19 stands at almost twice the capacity of the Yankees’ home stadium, and has reached another booming landmark: 100,000 deaths.

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US passes 100,000 coronavirus deaths as states relax lockdown measures

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US recorded more deaths from the disease than any other country in the pandemic

The United States has recorded more than 100,000 deaths from Covid-19, moving past a grim milestone even as many states relax mitigation measures to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The US has recorded more deaths from the disease than any other country in the pandemic, and almost three times as many as the second-ranking country, Britain, which has recorded more than 37,000 Covid-19 deaths.

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Trump threatens social media after Twitter puts warning on his false claims

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  • Twitter added warning on tweets that spread falsehoods
  • President vows to ‘strongly regulate … or close them down’

Donald Trump has threatened to “strongly regulate” or close down social media platforms that do not meet his standards for ideological balance, a day after Twitter, for the first time, slapped a warning label on a pair of Trump tweets spreading lies about mail-in voting.

Related: George Floyd killing: sister says police officers should be charged with murder

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Trump’s devoted new press secretary is no different from her predecessors | David Smith

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Kayleigh McEnany offered a straight-faced defence of Trump’s wildest conspiracy theories during a Tuesday briefing

“I will never lie to you,” declared Kayleigh McEnany on her debut as the White House press secretary at the start of the month. “You have my word on that.”

That would be a welcome change, reasoned critics of Donald Trump, but their hopes of a change in the way his administration communicates have been dashed.

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Twitter labels Trump’s false claims with warning for first time

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President rails against decision after his tweets on mail-in voting are marked with message: ‘Get the facts’

Twitter for the first time took action against a series of tweets by Donald Trump, labeling them with a warning sign and providing a link to further information.

Since ascending to the US presidency, Trump has used his Twitter account to threaten a world leader with war, amplify racist misinformation by British hate figures and, as recently as Tuesday morning, spread a lie about the 2001 death of a congressional aide in order to smear a cable news pundit. Throughout it all, Twitter has remained steadfast in its refusal to censor the head of state, even going so far as to write a new policy to allow itself to leave up tweets by “world leaders” that violate its rules.

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Andrew Cuomo gave immunity to nursing home execs after big campaign donations

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Critics say data proves New York’s liability shield is linked to higher nursing home death rates during the pandemic

As Governor Andrew Cuomo faced a spirited challenge in his bid to win New York’s 2018 Democratic primary, his political apparatus got a last-minute boost: a powerful healthcare industry group suddenly poured more than $1m into a Democratic committee backing his campaign.

Less than two years after that flood of cash from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), Cuomo signed legislation last month quietly shielding hospital and nursing home executives from the threat of lawsuits stemming from the coronavirus outbreak. The provision, inserted into an annual budget bill by Cuomo’s aides, created one of the nation’s most explicit immunity protections for healthcare industry officials, according to legal experts.

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Kentucky lockdown protesters condemned for hanging effigy of governor from tree

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Incident at conservative rally draws backlash from Democrats and Republicans

Political leaders in Kentucky have condemned rightwing protesters against the state’s measures to fight the coronavirus, after the demonstrators hanged an effigy of Democratic state governor Andy Beshear from a tree.

The incident happened on Sunday during a protest in favor of gun rights and other mostly conservative causes. Several men produced a rope and an effigy and strung it from a tree outside the state capitol building in Frankfort.

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Trump spends Memorial Day weekend golfing and insulting female politicians

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President tweets and retweets personal attacks against Pelosi and Abrams as US approaches 100,000 coronavirus deaths

Even by Donald Trump’s standards, it was a wild ride. On a Memorial Day weekend when coronavirus deaths in the US closed in on 100,000, and a grateful nation paid respects to its war dead, its president took to the golf course and turned to social media to unleash a barrage of personal attacks on foes old, new and perceived.

On Saturday and Sunday, both days on which Trump visited his golf club in Sterling, Virginia, he followed his time on the links with late-night Twitter sessions tweeting or retweeting insults to prominent female politicians.

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Joe Biden forced to make his fundraisers fully virtual – bar the price tag

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The pandemic has led the presumptive Democratic nominee, like other politicians to take his high-dollar events online

The coronavirus pandemic may have driven Joe Biden into his basement and forced his campaign online, but one crucial factor is still the same: his run for the White House still needs to raise giant amounts of money.

Related: Campaign wars: Trump rallies base while Biden tries to broaden his

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‘We’re expendable’: black Americans pay the price as states lift lockdowns

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Experts warn reopening states could have dire consequences on public health, and black Americans already face greater risk

Donald Trump recently shared a doctored video of his head superimposed on to actor Bill Pullman’s character in the 1996 film Independence Day’s crowd-rallying scene, likening frontline workers to warriors.

But it rang hollow for Denita Jones, a Dallas-area call center worker. For many black, essential workers like her, the message is about reopening the economy, but the real meaning is more subtle.

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